Introducing the Series “Too Great for Words: The Ineffable in Sound and Text”

Toni Morrison knew the value of the unspoken. “One has to work very carefully with what is in between the words, what is not said,” she told Caroline C. Denard, “which is measure, which is rhythm,…it is what you don’t write that frequently gives what you write its power.”1 What is in between the words is a soundscape of its own; it is not easily analyzed, but it is intelligible and carries significant meaning. The articles in this special series investigate the ineffable as a soundscape and honor the ethical imperative to engage the unwritten and unsaid in our work on early America in conversation with contemporary literature and art. We are interested in tracing the ways in which the ineffable carries meaning and power, and in the many shapes it takes—from dance to music, to howling, breathing, and silence, among many others.Silence is a possible form of the unsaid, but not the only one. Notions of the ineffable may be adjacent to but not identical with silence. Bennett Hogg suggests that silence, if defined in spatial terms, “marks not only places where sound is absent, but places where sound can be seen to be absent.”2 Building on this definition, we consider “ineffable” moments in which the alphabetic and the articulate are not only replaced by the aural or the embodied but are also demonstratively insufficient. Articles in this series agree that the ineffable is an aesthetic challenge that holds the possibility of a political one: For these authors, the absence of linear speech is not a mere circumstance but rather a political moment that opens a space of critique.In this series we emphasize voices, songs, and sounds that resonate beyond or question Eurocentric, Anglo-Saxon, and settler-colonial discourse. Doing so requires finding meaning beyond linguistic utterances; in “measure” and “rhythm,” for example, as Morrison suggests in Beloved, when Baby Suggs ends her sermon in the woods and “dances…the rest of what her heart had to say.”3 At other times, the ineffable may sound like howling, like the “fine cry—loud and long” in Morrison’s Sula, with “no bottom and…no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.”4 Here, the ineffable derives its power from being unquantifiable: It expands through space, filling the landscape with its inarticulate but all-encompassing truth.A focus on history indicates how the ineffable can offer a point of access to the past that pushes through and beyond the colonial power structure of the archival record. In her study of enslaved women in urban spaces in 17th-century Barbados, Marisa Fuentes focuses on the women’s vocal response to pain that becomes evident through the white-authored British colonial archive. “The enslaved women’s screams,” she writes, “become both an affective and inaccessible form of expression, impossible to cohere or translate into narrative form.”5 Fuentes’s research indicates that sound can bypass the written word that occasions its memory, resonating through time by means of language but never fully translatable. Pain itself, in the moment it is experienced, is inaccessible to words, and writing about pain in history can only fail to fully translate that experience into language.The articles in this special series mobilize a comparable understanding of sound that bypasses language and narration even when sound is communicated via them both. Each of the contributions centers the relationship between sound and power, colonialism and its critique, through literature that is historical or that engages historical acts of oppression, and finds sounds that address unspeakable violence or emanate from in between the words of the oppressors. We attest that agencies do not need words to manifest themselves but thrive in the ineffable, as they do in alphabetic articulations. With this in mind, we reread literary texts from the American antiquity onward from the vantage point of sound and silence in general, and the ineffable in particular, and ask how this perspective may assist us in describing and/or dismantling the orthodoxies of imperial historiography. We put early America and the 19th century in conversation with the present and ask: What changes in our engagement with American culture, history, and literature when we foreground sound? How does the ineffable in early and 19th-century America reverberate in later texts and today? How can the printed word credibly engage with its negation, with the ineffable, with silence, and with sound?The unique relationship between literature and sound has been extensively researched.6 Angela Leighton describes a kind of reading that amounts to listening, an activity during which she finds herself “going slower, no longer following the lines to the end in order to discover what is meant, but attending instead to any number of incidental rhythmic effects and sound combinations.”7 Leighton insists that “written words make noises,”8 and the reader’s imagination adds sound to otherwise merely lexical suggestions. In this sense, literature is both explicitly silent and full of sound, and that dichotomy can become literature’s own interest: “Both the ear’s limitation, and the unnerving reach and ubiquity of sound, are facts explored by literature’s own awareness of the written word’s mixed silence and audibility.”9The soundscapes of literature, as well as the historical soundscapes evoked in some of the essays of this series, mobilize a reader’s sonically experiential past toward an imagination of a more distant, unrecorded soundscape. This understanding creates a bridge between literature’s double focus as outlined by Ian Marshall, according to whom “a literary text can be both a virtual soundscape on its own and a key source of information about the soundscape of a given time and place.”10 More radically, R. Murray Schafer understands literature as “earwitness accounts,” suggesting for instance that Chateaubriand “provides us with useful information about the ambient sound level”11 of the Niagara Falls, and that “All Quiet on the Western Front is convincing because the author was there.”12 While literature does indeed offer an in-route toward sensory experiences of the past, Schafer’s approach to studying literature runs against some central tenets of literary studies. Works of literature, especially novels, are not records of the past. Even if based on real-life experience, any event within a novel is isolated from its larger context and part of an aesthetic rather than verisimilar creation.13 Novels, but also poems and other cultural texts, create imaginary soundscapes, each with its own individual relationship to history, veracity, and environment. It is this capacity to create imaginary sound that enables a text to speak into silence: “The purpose of literature is somehow to turn up the volume of that listening when we hear ‘nothing,’ to make it speak or sing.”14 For this precise reason an attention to sound attunes the study of literature to expressions of ineffable things.Imagination is key, also because—and here Schafer would agree—sounds and the cultural understanding of them changed historically. Within the logic of physics, sound is an object that crashes into things—the sound of a hailstorm in early America’s vast wilderness deflects differently from a forested mountainside than from a sprawling city. And perception is historically contingent. Early American writing is particularly insistent on its description of sound: For canonic writers like Mary Rowlandson, William Bradford, John Smith, and Cotton Mather, the soundscape of early America was replete with howling wind, crashing rain, and the calls of wildlife echoing through the forests and swamps of a hostile environment. Rowlandson writes of a “howling wilderness” (20), Bradford reports of “hideous and great cries”15 in the night, Smith remembers the “hideous…howling of wolves,”16 and Mather includes snarling wolves and crying lambs in his tracts on witchcraft. According to Richard Cullen Rath, “Sound mattered to early Americans in ways that it no longer does today, particularly in the years between 1607 and 1720 or so.”17 He offers thunder as one example, which in the 17th century was thought to cause destruction (rather than lightning).18 Though scientifically moot, this earlier understanding did grant a historically specific, more efficacious capacity to sound. In Rath’s words, “thunder and other natural sounds did things then that we no longer allow them to do.”19In imagining a vibrant soundscape of early America, Lauren Groff’s 2023 novel The Vaster Wilds illustrates how sound studies and literary studies may converge in close readings of the ineffable. Its protagonist, a young girl given various derogatory names throughout her life, escapes the Jamestown Colony during the early 17th century to travel the North American continent largely on foot, in hopes of reaching French settlers. The narration hinges on the focalization of this strong, solitary character, whose experience of the wilderness is infused with the soundscape of the weather and rivers, of animal and plant life. Hogg calls our attention to the tradition of treating both landscape and silence, and the inarticulate, as a somewhat unremarkable background for word and action, but The Vaster Wilds—and the study of ineffable soundscapes—reverses this implicit hierarchy between subject and background, focusing interpretive energies on the latter.20 As the seriously injured, feverish girl walks, her reflections pit her present experience against her English past:There had come to her, solid and clear, the understanding in her rattled brains that in the time of her absence from it the known world, her natal city of dirt and noise and pig and horse and overweening life and all the other cities in the entirety of civilization, all the screaming fishwives and all the barristers and musicians and the servants, all had been struck down by the most terrible plague the world had ever seen.…And this far worse plague of her imagination filled her mind with visions. For all the human noises in her city diminished to silence, the bells stopped pealing, the voices were no more; the only sound was the wind blowing up the miles from the sea, the kites screaming and pecking at the bodies of the dead, the gulls and pigs and dogs out fighting for their scraps, and the collapsing of roofs and shattering of windows without the many hands of humans to keep the city alive.21In this instance, the novel frames the girl’s experience of both English city life and the uncolonized wilderness across the Atlantic as, respectively, claustrophobically oppressive and liberating and redemptive soundscapes. The description of the protagonist’s head injury, sustained when a Spanish hermit threw a rock at her, also invokes sound: The girl has “rattled brains,” readers are reminded multiple times, so that her pain and inner state of turmoil become legible through a sonic imagination. Groff invites her readers to envision the soundscapes of the two locales plus her central character’s physical body, appealing to their sonic senses to evoke an affective stance that utilizes a reader’s own past experience of sound.The Vaster Wilds does not elevate the sonic over the visual. Vivid descriptions of grand vistas, splendid clouds, roaring waters, and shining icicles paint a picture of astonishing beauty and life-threatening danger. But the novel refuses to grant the visual prevalence over the aural. Actions are first heard then seen—we hear kites “screaming” before we see them “pecking”—and the plasticity of verbs goes hand in hand with their audibility, as in “the collapsing of roofs and shattering of windows.”22 The novel thereby dissolves a common dichotomy criticized by Michele Hilmes, according to which sound is “associated with emotion and subjectivity as against the objectivity and rationality of vision.”23 The girl’s vision switches between verisimilar and imaginary as much as her hearing does, during a journey that ultimately leads to a kind of self-reflection that upends a colonizer worldview, refutes human domination over animal life, and negates the notion that Native Americans should be Christianized.24 Sound, in these instances, is on par with vision, in a narrative that upends a binarism of emotion versus reason. It is no coincidence that in the long quote above, the description of the old continent’s noises giving way to the extended, protruding sound of the wind is prefaced by a sentence that frames these sounds as the girl’s “visions.”25Because Groff’s novel approaches sound in writing, in addition to being deliberately framed as fiction, the soundscape that The Vaster Wilds creates remains an approximation. The novel offers an aural imagination of early America, one that hinges on the protagonist’s increasing silence. Earlier in her journey, the sight of a fish in a river prompts the girl to utter a solitary “yes,” and not long afterward she answers, “No. Not yet” when the vision of a bird inquires about her willingness to surrender to her injuries.26 These very short utterances interrupt the otherwise extensive, almost ornamental sentences of Groff’s prose, small interferences in the otherwise nonhuman sonic wilderness. The few spoken words instantiate a questioning of ideology: In the bird’s imaginary speech, the girl questions the concept of predestination according to which a few elect souls enter heaven after death. The task of the ineffable, then, is to explore the interstices between the landscape’s sonic abundance and the scarcity of human language. The girl’s thoughts push against the limits of what her rudimentary education enables her to put into words, pressing against the ineffable.As Groff’s narrative continues, the girl’s capacity to speak diminishes after she contracts smallpox and as a result of her ongoing isolation. In appreciation of her makeshift boat, she “gives thanks aloud in a cracked voice.”27 This line shows how the sonic quality of the protagonist’s voice, its crackling, its brokenness, reveals more about her inner world than the words she utters, generally reported as “giving thanks.” Her increasing silence culminates in a moment that shows how true appreciation of nature cannot be put into words: Coming upon a bear and her two cubs, the narrative informs us, “She could not speak words of the mouth, her mouth would not obey her, and so she spoke words of the heart, and the words said that she loved the baby bears.”28 Throughout Groff’s novel, an expansive soundscape eventually consumes the protagonist’s inner world, while emotionality itself becomes ineffable.There is what Wai Chee Dimock calls “environmental ‘noise’” that is “a part of signal transmissions, especially transmissions across time” in a reading of The Vaster Wilds.29 Dimock’s evocation of sound in this instance is metaphoric: Mary Rowlandson’s 1682 The Sovereignty and Goodness of God echoes through history, with Louise Erdrich responding to the call in 1984.30 Groff offers a counterweight to Rowlandson’s well-known captivity narrative, in which the nuts of the forest serve the girl well instead of being, as in Rowlandson’s account, never enough, and in which Indigenous Americans live alongside of but separate from the English girl, whose smallpox infection would prove dangerous to them. Rowlandson’s echo, too, is ineffable in The Vaster Wilds: The publication of The Sovereignty antecedes Groff’s Jamestown setting, and the girl’s illiteracy prohibits the kind of religious directness of Rowlandson’s writing. For readers, however, there is an unvoiced conversation across the centuries, one in which the girl’s questioning of religion, missionizing, and colonization answers to Rowlandson’s original, colonialist thought. Such reverberations across history inform this special series: The articles allow for contemporary art to speak back against the past, and literature of the past offers new impulses as it experiences a reconsideration that is attuned to matters of sound and pays attention to the ineffable.Jairo Moreno, via Giorgio Agamben, points out that naming the unspeakable, the ineffable, the unsaid as shows the capacity of language to its own negation, and to its where the ineffable is as the printed this and other In her to insists on the of her own This is a can only be told by not a of language to which language is The ineffable is not a in The of as well as of the other studies that make up the for this series, shows that the of the literary ineffable is not a to point at the of language. The ineffable has points of with of the as that the silence of writing and special series is into two with the first one focusing on In “The as a and in of the the ineffable as an point for of canonic Building on work by and on the in of the to and the that expands from what is to understands the as a in which more sounds reverberate than the and In the within the a more extended, more human with Indigenous Americans can be the and the in The of to a contemporary literary engagement with the history of colonization from an Indigenous to as both unwritten of and to ineffable In the ineffable the of of years of is to push past that a beyond our and into the part of this series with a short by and In to the and the and are of the between what cannot be in words and the archival that result from the and violence of readers and to to to hear beyond the soundscape of and what is or This turn to listening as a also a turn to of and that should be in the of a of written archival records and the in this series, in the the in listening in the 19th century by the of with the writing of and literary of the sound of through the of the and that the of the ethical in literary and cultural been to the the sound of expands these to to sounds as in nonhuman into as with and be a part of settler-colonial language.The part of this series the of the ineffable in conversation with the and for the of new sonic with The and and in sounds that colonial archival and the of music, and in texts, especially the they in of memory, and The of the of a was by historical as the on the as well as by a study of the ineffable in the North American context is a study of from archival to the and the contributions in this special series on written texts, they on the of the ineffable in put into words, how is it How can the ineffable be written As in and studying the ineffable is an to and approaches that foreground the over the of this of includes with writing and instead of in this series these in their to honor the ineffable and its via the of sound them into the of literary studies as they to between the